Janice Rogers Brown—one of my favorite federal judges—will retire next month from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Damon Root has called her, “The most libertarian federal judge in America,” and that may well be true. In a speech to the Federalist Society, in which she quoted both Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, Judge Brown observed that:

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.

Such frankly expressed views won Judge Brown many enemies. Her nomination to the D.C. Circuit (by George W. Bush) was held up for years by Senate Democrats, including a newly elected senator from Illinois named Barak Obama. In one of his first speeches on the floor of the Senate, Obama said he opposed Judge Brown’s nomination “in the strongest terms”:

Justice Brown believes … that the New Deal, which helped save our country and get it back on its feet after the Great Depression, was a triumph of our very own “Socialist revolution.” … She equates even the most modest efforts to level life’s playing field with somehow inhibiting our liberty. …

She believes the Supreme Court should be able to overturn minimum wage laws. She thinks we should live in a country where the Federal Government cannot enforce the most basic regulations of transparency in our security markets, that we cannot maintain regulations that ensure our food is safe and the drugs that are sold to us have been tested. … [A]ccording to Justice Brown, … local governments or municipalities cannot enforce basic zoning regulations that relieve traffic, no matter how much damage it may be doing a particular community. …

It would be one thing if these opinions were confined to her political speeches. The fact is she has carried them over into her judicial decision making.